K. Harald Gjermundrød

Security, trust, and QoS in next-generation control and communication for large power systems

The present communication architecture supporting control of the electric power grid makes it difficult to use the wealth of data collected at high rates in substations, retarding their use in new applications for controlling the grid. A flexible, real-time data network would make it possible to use these data for many more control and protection applications, potentially increasing the grids reliability and increasing its operating efficiency. Applications that could use these data include: decentralised load frequency control; closed-loop voltage control; transient and small-signal stabilisation; and special protection schemes using data gathered over a wide area. Such applications and the flexibility of the underlying communication network imply greater data sharing between utilities, leading to new performance, availability and reliability requirements. This paper examines the security, trust and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements imposed by these applications and shows how they are met by mechanisms included in the GridStat middleware framework that we are developing.

g-Eclipse - an integrated framework to access and maintain Grid resources

The g-Eclipse framework provides a general, integrated workbench toolset for grid users, operators and developers. Based on the open source eclipse ecosystem, g-Eclipse supports scientists to interact with grid resources independent of the underlying grid middleware. Its main objective is to deliver an extensible framework for different grid actors, by providing a unified abstraction of the grid. The grid abstraction enables grid application users to access the grid in a desktop-like manner with wizards specific for common use cases; it also provides a set of visual configuration tools to maintain and configure grid resources.

Intensive Care Window: Real-Time Monitoring and Analysis in the Intensive Care Environment

This paper introduces a novel, open-source middleware framework for communication with medical devices and an application using the middleware named intensive care window (ICW). The middleware enables communication with intensive care unit bedside-installed medical devices over standard and proprietary communication protocol stacks. The ICW application facilitates the acquisition of vital signs and physiological parameters exported from patient-attached medical devices and sensors. Moreover, ICW provides runtime and post-analysis procedures for data annotation, data visualization, data query, and analysis. The ICW application can be deployed as a stand-alone solution or in conjunction with existing clinical information systems providing a holistic solution to inpatient medical condition monitoring, early diagnosis, and prognosis.

Leveraging the next-generation power grid: Data sharing and associated partnerships

Data delivery in the power grid today is, for the most part, hard-coded, tedious to implement and change, and does not provide any real end-to-end guarantees. Applications have started to emerge that require real-time data delivery in order to provide a wide-area assessment of the health of the power grid. This paper presents two novel communication infrastructures that facilitate the delivery of power data to intended recipients, each based on a different communication paradigm. The necessity of forming and managing trusted partnerships in either framework is further discussed.

g-Eclipse --- A Contextualised Framework for Grid Users, Grid Resource Providers and Grid Application Developers

As the future pervasive and ubiquitous computing environment will be composed of resources from local computing, Grid, SOA and Web infrastructures, the complexity of this distributed system will increase significantly. At the same time the end user wants easy and simple access to his computing environment while he receives more responsibilities i.e. for the composition and the management of the system. In order to perform his daily work, the end user needs a general workbench toolset which supports customisation and contextualisation for the user. The g-Eclipse framework offers an eco-system to access Grid infrastructures with support for contextualised user roles. Currently, the g-Eclipse framework includes contextualised perspectives for Grid end users, Grid resource provider and Grid application developers. The abstraction layer of the g-Eclipse system, its integration in the Eclipse framework and the main use cases are presented.

Wide-Area Actuator RPC over GridStat with Timeliness, Redundancy, and Safety

GridStat is a QoS-managed middleware framework designed to replace the power grids aging, inflexible, and slow data communications system. GridStat is a specialization of the publish-subscribe paradigm that takes advantage of the semantics of periodic updates of cached sensor data to provide data delivery with a per-subscriber rate, latency, and redundant paths. While GridStat is well-suited for delivery of sensor data over a wide-area network, its baseline one-way mechanisms are not suitable for round-trip invocations such as setting an actuator or calling between control centers. In this paper we present the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of Ratatoskr, a tunable remote procedure call mechanism that builds on the QoS semantics of GridStat and supports three kinds of redundancy. Additionally, user-defined pre- and post-condition predicates over GridStat status variables are built into the call semantics.

Intensive Care Window: A Multi-Modal Monitoring Tool for Intensive Care Research and Practice

Intensive Care Units are widely considered as the most technologically advanced environments within a hospital. In such environments, physicians are confronted with multiple medical devices that monitor the inpatients. The capability to collect, store, process, and share inpatient monitoring data along with the remarks of the treating physicians can bring tremendous benefits to all aspects of Intensive Care Medicine (practice, research, education). The IC-Window makes it feasible for physicians to extract, view, store, and replay Clinically Interesting Episodes through simple, intuitive user interfaces.

A Data-Centric Security Analysis Of ICGrid

The Data Grid is becoming a new paradigm for eHealth systems due to its enormous storage potential using decentralized resources managed by different organizations. The storage capabilities in these novel “Health Grids” are quite suitable for the requirements of systems like ICGrid, which captures, stores and manages data and metadata from Intensive Care Units. However, this paradigm depends on a widely distributed storage sites, therefore requiring new security mechanisms, able to avoid potential leaks to cope with modification and destruction of stored data under the presence of external or internal attacks. Particular emphasis must be put on the patient’s personal data, the protection of which is required by legislations in many countries of the European Union and the world in general. Taking into consideration underlying data protection legislations and technological data privacy mechanisms, in this paper we identify the security issues related with ICGrid’s data and metadata after applying an analysis framework extended from our previous research on the Data Grid’s storage services. Then, we present a privacy protocol that demonstrates the use of two basic approaches (encryption and fragmentation) to protect patients’ private data stored using the ICGrid system.

privacyTracker: A Privacy-by-Design GDPR-Compliant Framework with Verifiable Data Traceability Controls

Breach or lack of online privacy has become almost a commonplace of today’s digital age, mainly due to the inability of either enforcing privacy requirements or imposing strict sanctions against violations. The current state of affairs in data privacy is at a turning point for companies operating in EU state members as the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) empowers users with control over their personal data, including regulating its disclosure, withdrawing disclosure consent at any given time and tracking their data trail. Compliance with the GDPR is mandatory and it requires signifiant amendments and/or restructuring of data processing routines undertaken by enterprises. Currently, there is no framework to support the GDPR principles. This paper proposes privacyTracker, a GDPR-compliant framework that supports basic GDPR principles including data traceability and allowing a user to get a cryptographically verifiable snapshot of his/her data trail.

Recirculating Lost Coins in Cryptocurrency Systems

There is no doubt that the momentum for digital currency has grown the last few years. Numerous businesses have started accepting this alternative form of currency as payment method and digital currency platforms are emerging to seize the opportunity to explore new markets. The potential of digital currency payment protocols to act as replacements of existing monetary systems is faced with challenges related to financial, regulatory, societal, and technological factors. In this paper, we are addressing the issue of deflation that could occur in cryptocurrency systems supporting a finite cap on the total amount of currency that will ever be in circulation. Our approach leaves intact the core functionality of these systems.